A federal judge permanently blocked Florida’s new voter suppression laws from going into effect on Thursday, issuing a blistering ruling that said the bill unfairly and unconstitutionally violated minorities’ voting rights.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked three major components of the sweeping bill from going into effect because they suppressed Black voters:
- A requirement that third-party voter registration drives include warnings, such as telling voters their registrations might not be done in time to vote;
- New limits on ballot drop-boxes including confining them to early voting hours unless they’re in a supervisor’s office and requiring them to be guarded at all time, and;
- A new law criminalizing the act of helping voters in line, even if it’s something as simple as handing out water or snacks.
Walker, an Obama appointee, also put the state back into pre-clearance status under the Voting Rights Act for the next 10 years because Florida has “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.” Pre-clearance means Florida will need to obtain federal approval before passing new laws related to those three issues.
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In his 288-page ruling, Walker shredded Florida’s “grotesque history of racial discrimination in voting” and said Senate Bill 90, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year, added to two decades of incremental attacks on voting rights.
He went a step further than suggesting such attacks disproportionately affect Black voters, instead saying that racism was a “motivating factor in SB 90’s adoption.”
“At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this Court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” he said. “Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this Court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
He also slammed higher courts, namely the Supreme Court, for “gutting” the Voting Rights Act and losing sight of “the spirit that spurred” its passage. “Federal courts would not countenance a law denying Christians their sacred right to prayer, and they should not countenance a law denying Floridians their sacred right to vote,” he wrote.
Florida’s law is one of several alarming voter suppression laws to be implemented across the nation in response to frenzied, but evidence-free, claims of widespread election fraud in 2020. The Department of Justice is suing Georgia for a bill that mirrors Florida’s.
The Florida lawsuit was filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida and the NAACP against Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican National Committee, and other state officials.
“Defendants argue that SB 90 makes minor prophylactic changes to the election code,” Walker wrote. “Plaintiffs, on the other hand, allege that SB 90 runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters—all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.”
After reviewing thousands of pages of evidence and listening to two weeks of testimony from 42 witnesses, “this Court finds that, for the most part, Plaintiffs are right,” Walker wrote.
While Walker’s injunction is permanent, his ruling is likely to be appealed to the more conservative-leaning 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
